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Britain's myriad of small towns remained at the heart of economic and social life into the early Victorian era, bridging the urban and rural worlds. Diaries like that of the Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner of East Hoathly reveal an almost constant interaction between villagers and small towns. Turner records how he went to the nearby town of Lewes to buy cottons and cheese, to attend property sales, pay debts, get a doctor, scotch rumours about the disharmony between him and his wife, to participate in church events, to ‘see the finest horse-race that ever I see run’ and as often as not to get drunk and come rolling home. While the traditional open market, the nucleus of most small towns since their inception, was often in decline after 1700, these communities consolidated their position in Georgian provincial society, growing in population and prosperity, as they acquired retail shops and specialist crafts, as well as new leisure activities. The transformation did not occur overnight. In the 1720s the antiquarian and polymath William Stukeley, fresh from London, was dismayed at the small town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, where there was ‘not one person … that had any taste or love of learning’ but within a few years things began to improve, as music making and club life blossomed, and he concluded eventually that this ‘is true life, not the stink and noise and nonsense of London’. By the 1760s Fanny Burney could talk of the ‘perpetual round of constrained civilities … unavoidable in a country town’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial towns in the early nineteenth century were seen as sources of social and economic problems. ‘Degeneracy’, wrote Richard Ayton in Swansea in 1813, ‘results from the increase of manufactories, and the consequent attraction of a larger population to one point’. The expansion of manufactures was perceived during the debate on the ‘Condition of England’ question in the early 1840s to be responsible for many social ills, some of which were urban. The town of the mid-nineteenth century has come to be represented by a series of pessimistic images, like the view of the cotton mills alongside the Rochdale Canal at Ancoats, Manchester, published by George Pyne in 1829, and by several much-quoted descriptions: Engels and de Tocqueville on Little Ireland in Manchester, or Reach on the east end of Leeds. Peter Gaskell summarised a popular perception when he observed that ‘the universal application of steam-power … separates families; and … lessens the demand for human strength, reducing man to a mere watcher or feeder of his mighty assistant’. Contemporaries were nevertheless aware that the development of manufactures was not synonymous with urban growth, that the factory system needed to be understood in rural as well as in urban contexts, at Egerton and Styal as well as in Manchester and Leeds. None of the industries which most conspicuously expanded in the century before 1840 – coal mining, textiles, the mining and processing of non-ferrous metals, ironmaking, hardware, glassmaking, ceramics – was essentially urban. Towns were significant in these industries, but they encompassed much activity outside urban limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversity of ports Ports were among the most dynamic towns during the commercial and Industrial Revolutions in Britain. They were also exceedingly diverse. By definition they were all boroughs or burghs with members of parliament, and councils controlling their domestic affairs. They enjoyed monopoly rights over foreign and most coastal trade. An English law of 1558 restricted trade to specified places and designated Legal Quays within them where all customable goods must be handled. There were approximately seventy-two English ports from 1696, when the customs service was reformed. In Scotland only designated royal and certain baronial burghs could trade overseas, and these were organised in thirteen precincts before the Union and approximately thirty ports thereafter. Although ports were separate entities, to some extent they competed with each other as part of the general or regional transportation system, but they shared characteristics that can be dealt with across the spectrum of places and activities. By definition ports grew round a waterfront, preferably the mouth of a river linking them to a hinterland, or, less successfully, a stretch of seashore enclosed by a pier or piers and dependent on land carriage. Almost universally throughout northern Europe this waterfront was lined originally with private warehouses backing on to merchants' houses facing the main street, maximising ground area while minimising expensive water frontage. There was usually a secondary centre round a market serving the local distribution network. In the eighteenth century the ground plan was elaborated in busy ports, with further streets for warehouses. However, the high cost of cartage and government failure to extend Legal Quays encouraged concentration round the waterside, raising land values and confirming the economic domination of those who owned it, with unfortunate effects for later developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An island nation is, commonly, a seafaring one, dependent for much of its way of life on seaborne enterprise. As Charles Lloyd put it in 1659 during the last Protectorate parliament, in which sat Scottish and Irish as well as English and Welsh members, ‘[w]e are islanders, and our life and soul is traffic’. The existence of a seafaring nation turns in large measure on the history of its ports, great and small – their relations with the rural hinterlands which satisfy their needs for food and labour and serve as important markets for their products and services; the multi-faceted roles they play in the nation's network of urban places, the fiscal and military resources they supply to the state; and the services they provide in trade and communication with the cultures and civilisations lying over the water. As island nations, early modern England, Wales and Scotland were simultaneously protected by the sea from potential continental enemies and points of passage. It is the tension between these two aspects of island life – the capacity of island peoples to withdraw behind the moat created by the seas surrounding them and their need to cross those same waters to find markets and supplies – that mark island nations as socially distinctive places. How their inhabitants negotiate this relationship and find a balance among its competing elements forms a defining feature of their society and culture. In early modern England, Wales and Scotland, the emphasis was increasingly on market-oriented enterprise and commercial exchange, thereby enhancing the dynamic role played by seaports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every schoolchild knows that an Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain was followed by massive, rapid, urbanisation; that technological change created a world in which people interacted with nature and each other through work in new ways, and therefore lived different kinds of lives in places of a sort previously unknown; that the innovation of powered machinery sucked the British population into factory towns at hitherto remote locations. These novitiate certainties are a stark contrast to the disagreements of expert historians about the nature of economic development and urban growth, and the ways in which they were related, in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There has been vigorous argument about what, exactly, the Industrial Revolution was ever since the term was first used. Recently, econometric analysis has even brought its very existence into question: whether the structure or growth trend of the British economy changed significantly before the 1840s is now hotly disputed. The high rates of urbanisation standing proudly in the statistical rubble created by this demolition job are not as incongruous as they might once have seemed. Complementary attacks on the idea that there was an Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain, based on hypotheses about the processes of change rather than on trends in economic series, stress the continuing overweening significance of London through the eighteenth century, and are replacing Thomas Gradgrind's Coketown with Samuel Pickwick's Eatanswill as the fictional exemplar of provincial urban life. Rather than being a time when systems of industrial production were suddenly transformed in supply-driven economic development, the eighteenth century is now considered by some historians to have been a time of consumer revolution, when increasing commercial and landed wealth energised demand-led industrial (and other sectoral) growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the region Urban growth in parts of northern England during the three centuries under review was spectacular even by the standards of the first industrial nation. It was spectacular in the literal sense that by the early decades of the nineteenth century not only business travellers but also tourists and social commentators were coming to marvel at the novel concentration of factories using fossil fuels in an urban setting in and around Manchester, and at the sheer scale of urban maritime and manufacturing activity in the other towns which were cohering and coalescing. The great industrial and commercial centres gathered up systems of satellite towns in their surrounding districts, conjuring up in one visiting mind the telling image of Manchester as a ‘diligent spider’ at the heart of its web of communications. These were accelerating developments, and they reached their most dramatic, interesting and historically important phase between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, when these new towns were at their most raw, untrammelled, dramatic, exciting and threatening: ‘great human exploits’ which produced and distributed a cornucopia of goods under a shroud of infernal smoke and under conditions which visibly threatened life, health and social and political stability. Provincial urban developments within the North had turned it into a symbol of the future, which might or might not work in the longer term, and by the 1840s the urban concentrations of the region had become the cynosure of the informed contemporary gaze. It therefore makes sense to begin this survey with an analysis of the scale and scope of urbanization within the region in 1840, and then to examine the roots of these unprecedented phenomena and attempt to describe and explain their development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long-run trends An analysis of long-run trends in the development of the capital's economy for this period must begin with the better statistics that become available during the second decade of the eighteenth century, after the Peace of Utrecht. This appears to have inaugurated a boom; the effect of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble was relatively short-lived, and Defoe, writing during the mid 1720s, would wax eloquent on London's growth: New squares and new streets rising up every day to such a prodigy of buildings, that nothing in the world does, or ever did equal it, except old Rome in Trajan's time … We see several villages, formerly standing, as it were, in the country and at a great distance, now joined to the streets by continued buildings, and more making haste to meet in the like manner; for example Deptford … Islington … Newington … Westminster is in a fair way to shake hands with Chelsea, as St. Gyles's is with Marybone … It is … to be observed, as a particular and remarkable crisis, singular to those who write in this age, and very much to our advantage in writing, that the great and more eminent increase of buildings in, and about the city of London, and the vast extent of ground taken in, and now become streets and noble squares of houses, by which the mass, or body of the whole, is become so infinitely great, has been generally made in our time, not only within our memory, but even within a few years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]